“For those of you looking for the above and a repeat of the RV770/GT200 launch where prices will go into a free fall, you’re going to come away disappointed. That task will fall upon the 5850, and we’re looking forward to reviewing it as soon as we can.”

Today the other shoe drops, with AMD launching the 5870’s companion card: the slightly pared down 5850. It’s the same Cypress core that we saw on the 5870 with the same features: DX11, Eyefinity, angle-independent anisotropic filtering, HDMI bitstreaming, and supersample anti-aliasing. The only difference between the two is performance and power – the 5850 is a bit slower, and a bit less power hungry. If by any chance you’ve missed our Radeon HD 5870 review, please check it out; it goes in to full detail on what AMD is bringing to the table with Cypress and the HD 5800 series.

ATI Radeon HD 5870

ATI Radeon HD 5850

ATI Radeon HD
4890

ATI Radeon HD
4870

Stream Processors

1600

1440

800

800

Texture Units

80

72

40

40

ROPs

32

32

16

16

Core Clock

850MHz

725MHz

850MHz

750MHz

Memory Clock

1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5

1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5

975MHz (3900MHz data rate) GDDR5

900MHz (3600MHz data rate) GDDR5

Memory Bus Width

256-bit

256-bit

256-bit

256-bit

Frame Buffer

1GB

1GB

1GB

1GB

Transistor Count

2.15B

2.15B

959M

956M

TDP

188W

151W

190W

150W

Manufacturing Process

TSMC 40nm

TSMC 40nm

TSMC 55nm

TSMC 55nm

Price Point

$379

$259

~$180

~$160

AMD updated the specs on the 5850 at the last moment when it comes to power. Idle power usage hasn’t changed, but the final parts are now specified for 151W load power, versus the 160W originally given to us, and 188W on the 5870. So for the power-conscious out there, the 5850 offers a load power reduction in lockstep with its performance reduction.

As compared to the 5870, AMD has disabled two of the SIMDs and reduced the core clock from 850MHz to 725Mhz. This is roughly a 15% drop in clock speed and a 10% reduction in SIMD capacity, for a combined theoretical performance difference of 23%. Meanwhile the memory clock has been dropped from 1.2GHz to 1GHz, for a 17% overall reduction. Notably the ROP count has not been reduced, so the 5850 doesn’t lose as much rasterizing power as it does everything else, once again being 15% due to the drop in clock speed.

With the reduction in power usage, AMD was able to squeeze Cypress in to a slightly smaller package for the 5850. The 5850 lobs off an inch in length compared to the 5870, which will make it easier to fit in to cramped cases. However the power connectors have also been moved to the rear of the card, so in practice the space savings won’t be as great. Otherwise the 5850 is a slightly smaller 5870, using the same sheathed cooler design as the 5870, sans the backplate.

Port-side, the card is also unchanged from the 5870. 2 DVI ports, 1 HDMI port, and 1 DisplayPort adorn the card, giving the card the ability to drive 2 TMDS displays (HDMI/DVI), and a DisplayPort. As a reminder, the DisplayPort can be used to drive a 3rd TMDS display, but only with an active (powered) adapter, which right now still run at over $100.

AMD tells us that this is going to be a hard launch just like the 5870, with the 5850 showing up for $260. Given that the 5870 did in fact show up on-time and on-price, we expect the same for the 5850. However we don’t have any reason to believe 5850 supplies will be any more plentiful than 5870 supplies – never mind the fact that it’s in AMD’s interests to ship as many 5870s as they can right now given their higher price. So unless AMD has a lot of Cypress dice to harvest, we’re expecting the 5850 to be even harder to find.

Update: As of Wednesday afternoon we have seen some 5850s come in to stock, only to sell out again even sooner than the 5870s did. It looks like 5850s really are going to be harder to find.

I have to point this out because it's something I've now seen on two websites and it irks me a little bit just like 'solid state capacitors' does. In the last sentence on page one the plural of die in this case is dies not dice. Someone didn't edit this carefully! Reply

btw, this card is powerless against "the way is meant to be played"
nvidia keeps bribing developers left and right, ATI does nothing
(except boring sideshow penis wars), meanwhile the poor ATI users cant seem to play NFS SHIFT 640 x 480, all set to low, ( my -rebranded- 9800 does it great btw) + there is no in-game selective AA available to any ATI Radeon user in Batman, (another TWIMTBP game) + it looks like empty crap with all the shit nvidia - removed ( yes, really no smoke? no papers? no flags? not even static flags? what about GRAW? it used to work fine on reg cpus...) Reply

I suppose we probably have to wait for the consumer driver release to know for sure, but how is the stability of these? The only two AMD cards I have direct experience with have both had driver issues, so that is the one factor that would keep me from considering one of the lower-powered versions of this architecture once they are released. Reply